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Comment by dynamoa | Hacker News Reader

why is this, it feels like every other person is a senior nowadays. does it even have any meaning anymore?

it seems like "staff" or "principal" roles are the real "seniors"

The problem is that companies with less-experienced upper management think that they can save money by handing out awesome new titles instead of more money. In the short term, they’re right, it’s an old trick that will always work… on certain people. But the people that works on are the kind of people you probably don’t want to retain. Often this happens at companies that have a small software team, but are not primarily software or even technology companies.

I’ve interviewed “Principal Software Engineers” whose understanding of software engineering and computer science were minimal, and it’s because of this phenomenon. Just last week I talked to one who couldn’t explain what what makes an interface RESTful. They had no idea how Git works beyond commit and push. They wrote a unit test that did the exact same stateless thing twice, and asserted that the results were identical. They wanted $250K/yr.

It's because we started giving people senior titles at 6 months or a year of experience. I'm not saying there's a clock running until you can call yourself senior, but if you're doing it with less than 6-8 years of experience it should absolutely make people's eyebrows go up. How many projects can you really work on ideation, design, development, deployment, short-term maintenance and long-term maintenance in 2 years?

Just because the JS framework you're working with is 3 years old doesn't make you a senior because you have 2.5 years of experience with it. There's a lot more to the job than that.

Maybe that comes from job ads? Most companies want people with a few years of experience so that they've been "validated" by someone else, so they use the term "senior" to say "not junior".

Because, as the other poster put it, we're now "gatekeeping" if we don't put a big title badge on anyone with a few months of work behind them and willingness to talk big.

senior is 4-5 years of XP... staff and principal are real leadership roles. senior is short for more seniority than junior.

If a working career is 35-40 years, and most people will be ICs or low-level management for their entire career (meaning, most people won't ever be a Director or VP of anything), it seems unlikely that you can reasonably be considered "senior" after having completed about 10% of your career unless it's a transient thing.

Maybe the real problems are: the lack of advancement opportunities and lack of a real meaningful and achievable tech ladder at most companies.

You have maybe a 40 year career. If you get the "senior" title 2 years into it, odds are you'll have the same title for the next 38 years. That's kind of demoralizing if you're a "ladder climber" personality.

I remember quite clearly sitting in an office back in 2006 or so as a young punk but with enough years behind me to have already reached the salary plateau. Looked around me and saw a guy in his late 50s doing the exact same thing I was doing, with the exact same title, and probably making pretty close to what I was making. It filled me with existential dread! The realization that this industry hardly has any avenues for growth as an IC once you become "senior" and hit that salary plateau. If you don't want to be a people-manager, you're likely going to wander from company to company as a perpetual "Senior Software Engineer" until you are elderly and retire.

There are a handful of companies that have those "staff engineer" and "principal engineer" and "fellow" titles that come with actual salary growth, but they constrain those roles so severely, that most people won't get into the club. Just like most managers will not get into the Director or VP club. And these titles are not meaningful across the industry: If you do make "principal engineer" at your medium-sized startup, nobody else cares: when you get hired at Google, you'll be back to "Senior Software Engineer" and on the treadmill again.

It's kind of a reality that us worker-drones need to just accept and deal with. Companies don't seem to be motivated to provide actual, achievable growth paths that are transferrable from company to company.

Honestly I think places constrain those upper echelon titles so much because there really isn't that much work to be done at that level, and the vast majority of people just aren't that good at it.

> Companies don't seem to be motivated to provide actual, achievable growth paths that are transferrable from company to company.

The cynic in me says why would they if they're getting what they need without it? But taking a step back, most companies don't have any work worthy of someone who actually deserves a Principal or Fellow title. Even Staff doesn't mean much when you work at a logistics company with 10 developers - you're just a glorified manager at that point.

Inflation

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